When I’m in a pinch or into something new, one of the first places I turn is toward a template. I’ve built a stash of headline formulas, social media updates, and more to help organize my mind when it comes to working fast and learning something new.

I have my favorite go-to templates, and I was also able to dig up a huge number of others, created by some really amazing folks who are generous to help us all work smarter. I’ve collected them here below. I’d love to know which ones might be useful to you!

15 Time-Saving Social Media Templates

The list below is full of a variety of different templates, some helpful in a high-level way of organizing your marketing efforts and others in a specific area of social media marketing and sharing. If you have a favorite template that didn’t appear on the list here, let me know in the comments!

1. Social Media Report

We built this social media report to be easy to fill with just a simple Buffer data export. Take your Buffer stats and import them here, and you can see stats for the past week as well as how they compare week-over-week and to your monthly benchmark.

Instructions:

Export your data from Buffer or add in some stats manually (For extra oomph, you can pull more data from some of these free social reporting tools.)

2. The 15-Minute Social Media Audit

We’ve used this template on a monthly basis to check in with our social media accounts and see how things are growing, changing, and (hopefully!) improving. It’s also good to run through the list here to stay on top of any new networks or pages that might need a visual update to stay consistent with your branding.

Instructions:

Add all your social media profiles to the spreadsheet

Duplicate the sheet every month to have a fresh template to start with

3. Social Media Publishing Schedule

This template comes in handy for each new blog post that you publish—a way to extend the life of your content and get as much value as possible. Share a new piece of content multiple times, and schedule these shares once the article publishes. Here’s the schedule we go by:

4. Tweet Headline Templates

We get a lot of mileage out of headline formulas at Buffer, and a lot of this value comes in the way that we can use variations to share on Twitter and other social media outlets. In many ways, we consider these headline formulas to be a really excellent source of Twitter headline templates. I’ve placed them all in a PDF here for you to reference easily:

5. Copywriting templates

A copywriting template might seem a bit far afield from social media, but where we find the most social media value from these templates is in composing a short update or thinking through the value and message behind what we’re sharing.

For instance, here is a handful of copywriting templates that we’ve found valuable to think on while we’re scheduling new updates:

Before – After – Bridge

Problem – Agitate – Solve

The 5 Basic Objections

The 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 Formula

Michael Hyatt has a great system also for blog posts and longer social media updates:

6. Ways to write an update

We’ve written before about 71 ways to write a social media update (a handful of variations for each of the different networks). It’s been helpful for me to refer to this list often for new ideas and templates to try. Here is a sampling of favorites:

Multi-line tweet

Fill-in-the-blank

Title case vs. Sentence case updates

[NEW], [new post] or [blog post] to tell people what they’re clicking on (via)

All these templates are available in a spreadsheet where you can quickly test out and reference the different styles.

7. Visual social media templates

Visuals are a key component of the social media updates we post at Buffer, and one of the best resources for developing a system of visual sharing is the templates provided by HubSpot. The free download gives you 30 rectangular and 30 square templates, plus an assortment of warm, cool, and neutral color combinations.

8. Influencer Marketing Template

With influencer tracking, you can keep on file all those who have reached out to you or linked to you or otherwise made an impact on your social media profiles. You can turn the list into potential/future outreach options as well.

The great part of this template from Content Marketing Institute is that it includes social media follower numbers as well so you can easily combine your website and social strategies together.

9. Editorial Calendar Publishing Schedule

Along with organizing the way that you’ll promote each of your articles, it can be helpful to see how your content and social media marketing fit together from a bird’s eye view. Which campaigns are coming up? Which holidays? Which major events? What product launches or feature releases are on the horizon? Things like this can be great to add into an editorial calendar so that all your many events and activities can mesh with your social media marketing.

11. Social Media Content Calendar

Adding your content to this template from Hootsuite will help you stay on top of the performance of your social shares, making sure that you’re focusing on the best-performing posts and maintaining a steady stream of content across all your accounts.

Instructions:

Place the title or category of your update in the first column.

Add the update text to the second column.

Add the URL to the third column.

Check back on the performance of the post and add the number of clicks (or whichever metric is most key for you)

12. Social Media Image Sizes

There are many great social media image size templates out there. The one I keep coming back to is this resource from Sprout Social, which lists the ideal image sizes for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, YouTube, and Tumblr.

Sprout Social keeps the list always up to date, and you can find the ideal image sizes either via the blog post or via a free Google Doc.

13. Social Network Overview

For specific advice on each network—including a simple tutorial on identifying the different pieces and parts of the social network—the templates from Short Stack provide a lot of great value. Each one is available as a separate download so you can pick and choose the ones that are relevant to your strategy.

15. Twitter Chat Planning template

This template from Cathy McPhillips is great for those interested in starting up a Twitter chat. We’ve found that many of the fill-in-the-blank options here are similar to what we do for our weekly #bufferchat.

Bonus: Free Photoshop plug-in for ideal image sizes

Social Kit—a free resource from Source—contains templates for Facebook, Twitter, Google, and YouTube, as well as custom social buttons. If you’re savvy with Photoshop, you can download the Social Kit plugin for free and have an easy way to build ideal social images for your business.

Over to you

Which templates do you use to help with your social media marketing? Which ones from the list above looked most helpful? I’d love to hear from you about your favorites! Feel free to leave a comment below.

Hi there Gene! Thanks for the comment! Yeah, for other visual templates, I find the ones from Canva to be quite useful in terms of creating social media visuals. And for the content of this article, I just quickly ran through the reusable articles we’ve written about templates and took some screengrabs of the templates themselves. Hope that helps! Let me know if I can elaborate on anything else there!

Thanks for the reply, helps indeed. Checking Canva now, it’s really easy and the results are great.
How do you store articles (or parts of them) so that they are easily accessible in the future. Is there a template for that too? 🙂

Awesome yeah I don’t quite have a system for storing any snippets from the articles, sorry. I’ve written a good number of them, so I think I rely a lot on that experience, remembering bits and pieces of them. Whenever I can’t quite think of the exact article I wrote something, I’ll do a quick Google site search by typing in site:blog.bufferapp.com [keyword]

I don’t know how you keep coming up with all this great content, Kevan. I guess that’s why they pay you the big bucks, huh. 🙂 Just out of curiosity, come Week 1 in the NFL regular season, what team jersey will you be wearing on any given Sunday?

Thank you so much Kevan for sharing this with us! It’s not only gonna save me a lot of time but it will also help me to keep track of what works and what doesn’t and therefore improve my marketing as a whole. Since I’m still quite new in the marketing industry, posts like yours are really valuable for me. Gonna share it too 😉

I appreciate your work, Kevan, thank you. I downloaded the Hubspot template and customized a slide, though it saved only the background color without text or image (I made sure they were were both brought forward)—any suggestions? Or should I contact Hubspot…

2.Select all objects on a particular slide and group them by right clicking > Save as Picture. If you’re having any issues with text boxes or images not being included in the image you saved, you may need to:

•Ensure all elements are grouped by highlighting all elements > right clicking > selecting Group.

•Ensure when you right click to Save as Picture, you’re right clicking on the grouped entity as opposed to just the background image or a text box.

Templates are always very helpful, they make everything quick and smooth requiring simple touch ups, The list you have compiled is useful and surely going to give a pace to my marketing strategies. Thank You Kevan!

Super helpful templates. So definitely sharing this on my blog; http://desireeyearning.weebly.com/ and with other authors. Buffer has helped me tremendously with posting across social media. I especially love the helpful advice you all offer us as well. Thanks!

Awesome tips. Content Calendar is pretty useful for all levels of business. Thanks for the insight..

paigesjob

Just started to dive into the report card download (#1). It appears some of the formulas on this have broken. Is this still maintained, or is there an updated one? Iv’e been super excited to try it since upgrading to the small business plan!

Barbara Faison

Great information for new or seasoned entrepreneurs! Thanks for being so generous with your content.

Great post! Very helpful templates, thanks! I will save it and use in the future for sure 🙂
Also, about #14 luckily good tools for social listening like BRAND24 allows you to generate reports in xls, pdf or as infographic. It’s very nice and helpful feature.

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